Hate. It's such a heavy word, isn't it? We look into the eyes of a sweet orphan child and recall the words of some great prophet or other and say to ourselves, hate is such an evil thing, destroying our hearts and bringing things to a dark end and all... we shouldn't hate, we should love.

Or something. Whatever.

But I HATE SPAMMERS.

They steal from me.The rob my time.The break my tools.

They make everything suck with their sleeeze. THEY are a source of suckage.

Someone invents an awesome tool. It's useful and we use it. Like teh interwebs, a way to spread useful information.

Spammers break it.

Someone invents e-mail. We can contact people!

Spammers break it.

We switch to something else: MSN, bloggities, social networks.

Spammers break it.

We try twitter.

Spammers break it. The number of spammer followers I've blocked is twice the size of my actual followers list. I mention Vim Golf; some GolfUSA starts trying to follow me, hoping I will buy golf garbage. I don't golf. I hate golf. It's a retarded game where rich old men wear ugly clothes and hit little balls with metal sticks. You didn't even read what I said: GOLF in programming ISN'T HITTING LITTLE BALLS SO GO AWAY. But you ruined my day with your garbage spam. I had to waste time blocking your garbage and reporting you... which will do nothing, because if someone closes your account, you'll make another. Or 10.

We use search engines to find information: the web is just too big to find everything we want by reference alone.

Spammers break it. You can't find anything useful on more and more topics because people use the words you look for to say NOTHING. They somehow get paid because you were fooled into clicking, if only for the moment it took for you to realise they've wasted your time and you hit the BACK button. YOU SHOULD PAY ME FOR THAT CLICK, BUDDY.[You convince teh SE's to tell you what we are searching for so you can ruin our lives even more. (Oh and I don't use Duck-duck-go; there's [url=http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm]Scroogle and [url=http://ixquick.com/]Ixquick](http://donttrack.us/) and who knows what else)

And the worst thing is, many of these spammers don't think they are spammers. They're sitting right here, on SitePoint forums and other forums, asking about keyword density, SEO, whether content scrapers and spinners are alright (wtf? DIE) and which types to use. SPLOGS. How to use affiliate marketing, affiliate links, affiliate spam. Spam spam spam. You can have what you want so long as it's spam spam spam. Affiliate is now a dirty word, thanks to you! "But wait, I'm not garbage, I'm an SEO professional!" Uh, exactly: your job is TO BREAK THE GOOGLES, to make something come out on top REGARDLESS OF HOW USEFUL IT ACTUALLY IS TO SEARCHERS. Now those who really DO have the content and the products we want have to come to YOU just to try to rise above the spam... and still fail.

YOU BROKE MY MAILING LISTS.

YOU BROKE MY TOOLS.

YOU BROKE MY INTERNET.

You owe me for my time you've stolen when I looked for something, signed up for something, tried to talk to someone, and YOU answered with nothing but empty nothings, sales, promises, marketing, and garbage. AND PILLS. You know, why don't you try to sell me a bazooka so I can track you down and tell you what I REALLY THINK.

I want to take you and use you as personal pets to fetch me beer out of the fridge for a year. I want you to physically carry me and my friends and my things on your backs to wherever I want to go. Then I want you to go away and do something useful like make me a sandwich.

Hate is a strong word. When I'm robbed, of time and energy, I think I can say I'm not enlightened enough (sorry Siddharta) to turn the other cheek and say I love you. I hate you. I hate you all.

Because you get away with it. You never die. You never go away.

But the Internets, they exist for companies to earn money, right? I can't just sit back and expect free content like some entitled dirty hippy scum, right? Uh, no, I'm paying for access to information that other human beings (IE NOT SPAMMERS) are already offering for free. And if I'm looking for a product someone is selling, I don't want YOUR VERSION. Don't stop me from finding those who are actually selling what I DO want. Don't steal their content and spout pseudo-babble to "push them down in the rankings" because I don't want you, I want THEM. SPAMMERS, you prevent legitimate businesses from earning money on the Internet. Your arguments are retarded, because any "information" you think you offer (which you stole from others), someone else has already offered without ADS FOR HERPES TREATMENTS and GIVE HER THE HANDBAG SHE DESERVES. You offer NOTHING of value. You only destroy.

First WE built everything, developers in their free time, people's time building communities. What's the value in facebook and twitter and mailing lists and forums? The people who spend their time there, offer their knowledge and support there (for FREE), that's what. And you come along and break it all. We leave, fleeing the garbage. We try a new area, and for just a fleeting moment, there is relief. But you follow, and break everything, stink it up with your GET RICH QUICK, LIST YOUR SITE, EBAY CASH MACHINE, CHEAP DRUGS, EMAIL LISTINGS and MAKE HER SMILE garbage.

Of course, the absolute worst thing about it is, some of us are listening to you. Some of us are answering you, giving you money, spreading you around. Because if nobody replied, clicked on those links, bought those enhancement drugs, you would vanish. I hate you because YOU ARE ALSO OUR OWN FAULT. I hate me, even though I never clicked you, never bought you, never read you, but enough of my friends did that you could tell YOUR friends "this is the way to go".

Spammers, I HATE YOU. I hate you with all my worth. Sorry Confucious, I'm not a lady. Sorry Jesus and Muhammad, I cannot love here. No higher standards for me I guess.

meh, there are billions of nasty viruses and creepy crawlies the world over that we have to fight against our whole lives. We just have to deal with them as best we can. Stop anthropomorphizing spammers. They're just more of the same.

Stomme_poes
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2011-01-10T11:32:25Z —
#3

Thanks for posting........

system
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2011-01-10T12:55:54Z —
#4

Honey, I didn't thought you had it in you! I'm impressed. Good work(out)! Nice finish :lol:

But let me tell you this: you ARE a lady

And you, being a cat and all that, should understand fleas will never let you be. :rofl:

guido2004
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2011-01-10T13:03:35Z —
#5

Great post! Even your avatar is in style

r937
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2011-01-10T13:26:46Z —
#6

excellent post

regarding the impact in sitepoint forums, naturally we ban spammers, but i have always felt strongly that anyone who posts a fake sig should just be flat out banned immediately too

~especially~ the seo kiddies

Shaun
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2011-01-10T13:38:22Z —
#7

I had an e-mail address (back before I knew that mailto: links are a bad idea) that used to get about 300 spam e-mails a day.

So I started saving some of the funnier/weirder ones with the plan to make a mini-website of cartoons drawn from the subjects.

Such classics as, "Your manhood will fly like a white dove - independent and free."

uhh...

I got this really funny one from the alleged Bill Gates Foundation, offering me a pile of money I won in a lottery I never entered.

You need to see the graphic though.

xhtmlcoder
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2011-01-10T14:00:25Z —
#8

Wow flying, it didn't know it could do that... How do you train it to fly? Maybe I need to start a topic similar to JREAM. 'How to make my parts fly?'

Look on the bright-side Poes it gives you more focus on what to legitimately hate in the world, i.e. Spam.

Rubble
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2011-01-10T20:10:35Z —
#9

I have said the same thing about search engine results before; looking to buy a TV and you get the electrical sites selling the TV and a few hundred sites - some rated higher than the one selling the TV - with links to the same sites Google has found :mad:

Want to research a programming problem? One site has posted the answer/information you want but even more sites have copied the information from the site with the answer and reposted it or just posted a link to the first site. :nono:

Sometimes you have to wade through pages and pages of crap to find what you want.

All just to make money and make my life harder.

Email spam is not to bad now as I filter it on my server and delete it straight away and 99% of what gets through is picked up by my email program and moved straight into the junk folder. A quick scan through every now and again to make sure there is nothing in there I want and delete it all.

I suppose it is not all the spammers fault its the idiots that buy from them.

php_daemon
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2011-01-10T20:14:46Z —
#10

Careful there, it's a fine line between love and hate

Stomme_poes
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2011-01-11T08:14:09Z —
#11

Email spam is not to bad now as I filter it on my server and delete it straight away and 99% of what gets through is picked up by my email program and moved straight into the junk folder. A quick scan through every now and again to make sure there is nothing in there I want and delete it all.

Most people filter it, but since my online web-based mail system was losing too much in the spam folder, I have decided not to configure the spam folder in mutt for my other email address. This means I see it all, and since I use this email address almost entirely to make comments on web development-related articles, most of my spam is SEO-based (so when they claim they do NOT give your email address away, at least some of them must be lying).

Deleting it is easier in mutt than web-based email anyway : )

EnderMB
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2011-01-11T11:57:59Z —
#12

I blame Google for its poor search results. Over the past couple of months I have noticed that I have not found what I was looking on Google for more often than usual, and it made me think whether Google really needs to improve its search quality. All offerings from Bing and Yahoo have been poor, and largely I've found DuckDuckGo, a search engine made by one person to be the only other search engine that can be relied on for simple searches.

Spam isn't a new problem, yet the latest wave of SEO-touting spammers and compromised websites are starting to fill up the results. YouTube is almost a no-go area for me any more as any video I try to find is either a fake, has been removed or is an advert elsewhere. For less popular, but competitive searches it often takes some searching to find exactly what I need.

In a way I really hope that someone comes up with a viable opponent to Google, because search needs to be competitive again to boost the quality for us.

php_daemon
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2011-01-11T14:42:30Z —
#13

ULTiMATE said:

I blame Google for its poor search results.

Why don't you blame your own inability to use it effectively

I for one am satisfied with Google results and always easily find what I'm looking for. Of course it returns more "poor quality" results now than before - the web keeps growing and you will see more of those in the future. But it's a search engine, it's supposed to find everything, then it's up to you to qualify the results. I'd be very pissed if it didn't return me everything because it somehow made a decision for me of what I was looking for. That decision is for me to make, dammit.

If you want a decision engine, use Bing ^_^ Otherwise learn to use Google.

The only way I see how Google can pre-qualify the results is through personalization. But lo and behold they try to do it and become the bad guys again what with all the privacy issues, etc. Whine, whine, whine

EnderMB
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2011-01-11T15:06:41Z —
#14

php_daemon said:

Why don't you blame your own inability to use it effectively

I can use it effectively, but it takes a couple of tries.

In all seriousness, My searches are often niche (e.g. my latest search being "sitecore sc:link control") and it's these situations where Google is becoming worse. This may not seem like a bad thing, but I bet even the average person makes a number of searches on niche subjects, and they're the ones with something to lose should they find a page with popups, spam, etc.

php_daemon said:

I for one am satisfied with Google results and always easily find what I'm looking for. Of course it returns more "poor quality" results now than before - the web keeps growing and you will see more of those in the future. But it's a search engine, it's supposed to find everything, then it's up to you to qualify the results. I'd be very pissed if it didn't return me everything because it somehow made a decision for me of what I was looking for. That decision is for me to make, dammit.

In a way, Google already makes this decision for you by pushing these pages right to the end. I do agree that Google should let you see everything, but it would be nice for Google to give us some form of gauge so we can see if the remaining pages are going to be of any help.

php_daemon said:

If you want a decision engine, use Bing ^_^ Otherwise learn to use Google.

The name Bing just makes me cringe, and that's coming from someone who likes the idea of a search engine named DuckDuckGo.

I had high hopes for Bing when it acquired Powerset, but the last time I used Bing it was still awful.

php_daemon said:

The only way I see how Google can pre-qualify the results is through personalization. But lo and behold they try to do it and become the bad guys again what with all the privacy issues, etc. Whine, whine, whine

I think this is more to do with the medias lack of knowledge regarding personalisation algorithms. My parents will happily use personalised searches on Google or Amazon until the Daily Mail tells them that they are being tracked and watched whenever they search on their Internet connection.

Either way, for anyone that follows search engine research and progress it seems that Google are struggling for their next move. With Norvig behind them you'd think that AI would be the next best place to push to, and it's probably where they're going, even though real-time search is a big topic at the moment (and a load of nonsense IMO). The only thing I learn when I read popular Tweets is how to hate society.

system
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2011-01-11T15:44:54Z —
#15

We're heading back to human control? There is a critical point for Google now. SEO seems to be a hopeless job to me, with no future.

php_daemon
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2011-01-11T15:53:58Z —
#16

It's always taken me several tries ever since I started using Google in 2002 - I can't see any significant change there, I'm used to it.

Sure, it can always do a better job pushing down the most obvious spam, but it is doing it. The results could be much worse than they are. It's similar to email spam filters - it works but it's not perfect.

The problem is that most results that you think are poor quality are not what can be single handedly defined as "spam". Usually they have some substance and they can be useful to some people more than others. Most of the websites manipulate the results and the manipulation will only increase, dare I say, it will reach a point where it simply equals out.

Actually I think it really is a non-problem. Google reflects the web for what it really is, and there's no point in trying to skew the reality, even if Google itself is to blame for what the web has become.

There's room for tools that can learn from your searching behavior and make it easier to find the results you personally find useful. Personally being the key word, so inevitably there are "privacy issues" and resistance which, I think, is the bigger problem than technology.

guido2004
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2011-01-11T17:24:36Z —
#17

A long, long time ago... I used Yahoo, but then I discovered that Google gave much much better results. So I switched, and I never looked back.Google still gives me what I'm looking for, although there are moments in which certain searches give loads of nonsense pages, but that usually doesn't last long. In a couple of days the real results starting coming up on top again. It's a race between Google and 'SEO experts' I guess.

Rubble
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2011-01-11T17:55:03Z —
#18

I just put in a search for one of my website and on the first page I get:First 4 pages my website5 results saying how much my site is worth and giving details of how long its been up etc.Last result one of my pages.

Second page:9 results saying how much my site is worth and giving details of how long its been up etc.1 useful link to my site

Third page:10 results saying how much my site is worth and giving details of how long its been up etc.

What use to anyone are the links in blue ? One site with this information might be useful to a small amount of people.

So out of 40 results 36 are basicly junk.9,340 results were found does this mean that 90% of the google results are rubbish ?

php_daemon
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2011-01-11T17:59:17Z —
#19

No, that means there are few results to your query. As I mentioned before, it's supposed to find everything.

Rubble
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2011-01-11T18:03:56Z —
#20

I suppose it means then that the people that are creating usless websites have better people doing their SEO ?